these panels behind me being crooked is driving me nuts speaking of needing therapy that is driving me insane and I hope nobody else can see it can you see the panels behind me I can now that you mentioned it they look CR in it's annoying and I don't know how to fix it like clearly the camera's like a little off I'm I'm tempted to also leave it just to watch a thousand people upload the one comment that's like what's up with the Crooked panels in the background it's definitely the camera cuz the whole thing well
I I think actually Jordan This is perfect because you're getting a sensory input and what is it doing to you yeah it's making me self-conscious right now so a little dizzy there's an external signal and internally you are Disturbed right and so I'm noticing a change already to say the least right so your mind is thinking about this thing this thing needs to be shifted but this is another problem that a lot of people fall into now your internal piece is determined by whether you can straighten the panels I'm literally sweating right now it's not
cuz it's hot in here and all it is is tilted panels yep it's not the panels it's not even the panels the camera like moved a slight bit off center and it's just absolutely annoy you can't concentrate on anything my lost my mind bleep the fbom and and so this is the problem is we have all the sensory input but we don't know how to receive the sensory input we don't know how to modulate the sensory input and then we fall into to another trap which is that the way that we want to fix things
is by tilting the camera which is fair enough I'm with you I'm I'm now it's bothering me too yeah yeah great but we need to keep in mind that this is where a lot of people like lose control of their life because if you need the panels to be straight in order for you to be at peace your peace is now determined by the external world does that kind of make sense it does and that for that reason I'm going to leave these crooked for the rest of the show and the other reason is because
I have no idea how to straighten the camera without taking a bunch of time and wasting your time which I'm not going to do um yes that was great and I I appreciate that I was going to edit that out but now it's like we got to leave that in top comment what's up with the Crooked panels so so just pay attention to when the external world makes you feel a certain way a lot of us default to changing the external world oh my parents are mad at me because I didn't choose the right Topic
in college to study I didn't pick the right major and so now what I'm going to do to make myself feel better is I'm going to Cave to the people around me so that they are happy and if they are happy then I'm happy this is something that especially a lot of men do because we're kind of socialized in this way women are socialized in a very similar way slightly different but we have to live up to the expectations of other people this is where the shs come from yes and then the problem is that
if I have to live up to the expectations of other people for myself to be happy that means someone manipulative in my life will figure out that if I can make if I can be unhappy towards this person I can control their behavior it's huge inter open door for manipulation bosses parents girlfriends boyfriends friends right I can express unhappiness towards you that makes you feel bad in the way that you make yourself feel better is by making me feel better now I control your happiness with poet strings yeah oh my goodness that is so dangerous
incredibly dangerous that is incredibly dangerous I'd love to discuss the the sense of purposelessness that I think a lot of people are feeling I I know we're kind of already edging into that but I've read statistics that porn addiction is on the rise no surprise with the availability of porn having gone through the roof in the last you know 10 or 15 years suicide is on the rise uh you mentioned that especially among men um I think also especially among asian-americans this is horrifying because that means if you're like 18 to 24 the most dangerous
thing in your life isn't even your car anymore it's yourself yeah so that's for that's for Asians right so so Asians are raised to be very risk averse so they're less likely to have accidents as a cause of death which then then so that their accident rate is lower and they're they're more dangerous to themselves so it is I think the maybe the leading cause of death in asian-americans aged 18 to 2 for there are a couple of other things that go into that including the inability to get help so there's a culture that really
doesn't focus on mental illness uh doesn't really focus on they they really are like externally motivated so like if you're getting straight A's you should be happy and so the the one of the biggest mistake one of the most damaging things you can do to someone is tell someone that they should be happy because of a particular circumstance right now it's their fault that they are unhappy so this becomes their burden once again you should be happy whereas if the right move is to really ask yourself if you have every reason to be happy and
you're still not happy the question is why right if you really want to be find become happy it's not people bludgeoning you and telling you hey you should be happy someone told me 10 T 10,000 times that I should be happy doesn't make me happy the question is to ask myself why am I not happy yeah makes me feel worse actually cuz it's like well I'm supposed to feel happy I if if you told me I was supposed to feel crappy like I like in law school first year is horrible and everyone's like it's supposed
to be miserable then it ends and you're like okay so when it's miserable you go everyone's miserable supposed to be miserable it's much better than somebody being like wait you're not having the best time of your life everyone else is having a great time yeah you're the only one that's miserable something's wrong with you man so so I I think we we see that very clearly right now where a lot of people believe they should be happy and that's once again because they're we're fed this sensory diet of oh if I like have this particular
shirt or have this particular bag ha I'm so happy right if you look at like beer commercials it's people who are incredibly in shape socializing at the beach that's not if you go to a grocery store and you watch who's buying beer it's not models at the beach right no generally not and and yeah so this is a huge problem and you kind of mentioned purpose so like let's talk about that for a second so I I think what happens when we get bombarded with this sensory information is we literally we externalize our attention we
don't pay attention to our internal signals and then what happens is it's a war for census so whoever can convince us that their product will bring us the most happiness that's what we end up chasing so we have these very sophisticated marketing tactics advertising tactics where everyone says oh by the way you're unhappy buy this thing and it'll make you happy but it doesn't matter who wins you as the user will lose because you're not paying attention to yourself so we're seeing a whol scale externalization of our attention and the more we disconnect from ourselves
the harder it is to find purpose because the world can't tell you what your purpose is you have to figure out what your purpose is and that happens s primarily through introspection I guess if getting purpose externally worked then tiger parents whatever the Indian version of that and the white person version of that that would work really well but it doesn't um but it doesn't yeah right so we don't we don't know what we want there's also like another really interesting neuroscientific angle here which is that if you look at technology usage the other thing
that technology usage tends to do is numb our emotions not just our bad emotions our good emotions as well and once we start numbing our emotions we don't know what we feel and so when I lose my internal Compass because I become numb internally how are you supposed to find purpose when you don't feel anything right then the cycle repeats because now I don't know what to do now I'm not motivated let me go watch this motivational Guru and then the motivational Guru will give me the answers I I I feel like I might be
talking about something separate here so stop me if I am but my a friend of mine who who I grew up with who I saw recently reminded me of this he's like you're doing exactly what you wanted to do as a kid I'm like what are you talking about and he's like you're uh you're talking on I mean it's not the radio it's it's it's the modern equivalent I was like oh yeah and he reminded me of how we used to build FM transmitters in in the basement and try like got plans and went to
Radio Shack which doesn't exist anymore and soldered the thing together and put an illegal antenna on it that we fish out of someone's garbage and then it was like decades went by or a decade at least went by decade and a half and I became an attorney of all things right and my friend was like I never saw that coming and I'm like I'm thinking I never wanted to do that what happened and and when I started doing this the podcast I was like this is awesome and then I you know reminded me that I
always wanted to do this kind of thing but the signals had been so drowned out by you can't make money doing that that's not a real job that's something one in a million people get the chance to do that y y i I forgot about it I and not not I put it aside I literally forgot about it forgot it even existed yeah I I I think it's a very common experience I I I like the phrase drowned out I think it's it's a a beautiful way to describe what is happening to a generation of
people our own internal signals are getting drowned out by everyone including the boomer generation telling us hey like you should be doing this you should be doing this right so what's going on right now like at least in the United States and parts of Europe as well is we were all sold in the US on this dream that okay if you go to college if you go to college you'll get a good job if you get a good job you'll be able to afford a house you'll be able to get married right and and these
were this was the dream that we were sold but something happened along the way where now people who go to college are saddled with a bunch of debt you know are that the wage has relatively speaking decreased compared to things like home prices so you have a generation of people I I think 50% of people under the age of 30 are now living with their parents who are adults that's terrifying man I that that's the the the the pressure the the pressure is real I I'll never forget I wrote a letter of recommendation to Michigan
law for this Korean kid who I knew who said his mom literally told him I'm going to kill myself if you don't get into this school imagine the pressure this insanely unreasonable pressure and then he didn't get in and you know I'm pretty sure she didn't actually kill herself as a result but like I would I too would in my parents basement if I thought I was an abject failure cuz I didn't get into like Harvard Medical School and that was their dream for me since I was a little kid even though that is patently
unfair yeah absolutely right and that's what happens is is we get drowned out by this external pressure it's not just parents so sometimes you have parents that are supportive sometimes you don't but we have a pretty uniform pressure from social media to be a particular way to be rich to be successful to be you know six figures six feet at least a 6-in dick if you're a dude there's the female equivalent of like no thigh gap I mean sorry thigh gap man and having no thigh gap is like the worst thing on the planet and
and so women are taught this kind of stuff too and so we're all being taught like hey you should be this way and at the same time all of these Tech all of these Technologies are numbing our internal signals and then we get confused why there's a lack of purpose right the lack of purpose comes from an inability to connect with yourself and being drowned out
